Breast Cell Segmentation Under Extreme Data Constraints: Quantum Enhancement Meets Adaptive Loss Stabilization

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel breast cell segmentation method that combines quantum-inspired edge enhancement, adaptive loss stabilization, and weighted sampling to achieve high accuracy with minimal annotated data, significantly reducing expert annotation effort.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum-inspired edge enhancement and a stabilized multi-component loss function tailored for severe class imbalance in limited data scenarios.

Findings

Achieved 95.5% Dice score with only 599 training images.

Quantum-based enhancement improved boundary accuracy by 2.1%.

Weighted sampling increased small lesion detection by 3.8%.

Abstract

Annotating medical images demands significant time and expertise, often requiring pathologists to invest hundreds of hours in labeling mammary epithelial nuclei datasets. We address this critical challenge by achieving 95.5% Dice score using just 599 training images for breast cell segmentation, where just 4% of pixels represent breast tissue and 60% of images contain no breast regions. Our framework uses quantum-inspired edge enhancement via multi-scale Gabor filters creating a fourth input channel, enhancing boundary detection where inter-annotator variations reach +/- 3 pixels. We present a stabilized multi-component loss function that integrates adaptive Dice loss with boundary-aware terms and automatic positive weighting to effectively address severe class imbalance, where mammary epithelial cell regions comprise only 0.1%-20% of the total image area. Additionally, a complexity-based weighted sampling strategy is introduced to prioritize the challenging mammary epithelial cell regions. The model employs an EfficientNet-B7/UNet++ architecture with a 4-to-3 channel projection, enabling the use of pretrained weights despite limited medical imaging data. Finally, robust validation is achieved through exponential moving averaging and statistical outlier detection, ensuring reliable performance estimates on a small validation set (129 images). Our framework achieves a Dice score of 95.5% +/- 0.3% and an IoU of 91.2% +/- 0.4%. Notably, quantum-based enhancement contributes to a 2.1% improvement in boundary accuracy, while weighted sampling increases small lesion detection by 3.8%. By achieving groundbreaking performance with limited annotations, our approach significantly reduces the medical expert time required for dataset creation, addressing a fundamental bottleneck in clinical perception AI development.